Consumer Culture Theory

Domen Bajde is Professor WSR at University of Southern Denmark, where he heads the Consumption, Culture and Commerce research unit. His primary research interests include investigation of moralized markets and consumption, emergent technologies, and industry branding. Dannie Kjeldgaard is Professor in the Consumption, Culture and Commerce group at the University of Southern Denmark and VPP professor at the Univeristy of Gothenburg. Dannie's work analyses change processes of market-based glocalization, specifically how marketing and consumption constitute new sociocultural meaning systems. Russell W. Belk is York University Distinguished Research Professor and Kraft Foods Canada Chair in Marketing, Schulich School of Business, York University. His research involves the extended self, meanings of possessions, collecting, gift-giving, sharing, digital consumption, and materialism. This work tends to be qualitative, visual, and cultural.

Selected from papers submitted to the 13th annual Consumer Culture Theory conference in Odense, Denmark, in June and July 2018, the 12 chapters in this volume address aspects of consumer culture theory. Researchers from Europe, Canada, Tunisia, and Brazil focus on object agency and materiality, including love-lock pilgrimages, erotic products, interior objects and companion animals and their agency in the home, and curatorial consumption in the context of vintage outlets; glocalization, including the meaning of "cool" in Tunisia, middle-class Hindu second-generation British Indian women's use of various cultural resources for ethnic identification, and delegitimation practices of illicit alcohol in Kenya; markets, in terms of market-research test towns, the marketization of elderly care, patriotism in Russian fashion design, and practices underpinning the production of field-specific cultural capital at festivals; and the quality of storytelling in the consumer culture theory tradition.

• Introduction (Kjeldgaard, Bajde, Belk)Part I: Objects and their doingsChapter 1 - Love and Locks: consumers making pilgrimages and performing love rituals (Borraz)Chapter 2 - The Life and Death of Anthony Barbie: A Consumer Culture Tale of Lovers, Butlers and Crashers (Walther)Chapter 3 - "When your dog matches your decor": Object agency of living and non-living entities in home assemblage (Syrjälä and Norrgrann)Chapter 4 - "I'm only a Guardian of these Objects": Vintage traders, Curatorial consumption and the meaning(s) of objects (Abdelrahman et al.)Part II: GlocalizationChapter 5 - Story of Cool: Journey from the West to Emerging Arab countries (Zounaoui and Smaoui)Chapter 6 - Ethnic Identification: Capital and Distinction among Second-Generation British Indians (Pradhan, Cocker and Hogg)Chapter 7 - Cognitive polyphasia, cultural legitimacy and behavior change: The case of the illicit alcohol market in Kenya (Mwangi, Cocker and Piacentini)Part III: Constituting MarketsChapter 8 - Magic Towns: Creating the Consumer Fetish In Market Research Test Sites (Schwarzkopf)Chapter 9 - Humanizing Market Relationships: The DIY Extended Family (Ottlewski et al.)Chapter 10 - Patriotism as Creative (Counter-)Conduct of Russian Fashion Designers (Gurova)Chapter 11 - Culinary communication practices: the role of retail spaces in producing field-specific cultural capital (Galalae, Emontspool and Omidvar)Part IV: Quoth the RavenChapter 12 - Duck, it's a Raven!: Writing Stirring Stories with Andersen's Sinister Shadow (Brown)